The Mayor of Bristol wrote to the London authorities asking for extra money – to meet the cost of looking after 135 Africans who had been sleeping in a barn in the city.

But this wasn’t last week, last year or even during the Second World War but in 1590 – around a hundred years before Bristol took on a prominent role in the transatlantic slave trade.

The episode is one of many intriguing details in a new book which reveals, for the first time, African people have been visiting and living in and around Bristol for centuries.

Until now historians have said black people only really began coming to England as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, which Bristol began to get involved in at the end of the 1600s, when slave owners and rich merchants from Bristol brought back a handful of slaves as servants on the third leg of the triangular route from the Americas to England.

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But a new book has detailed how black people had been living in England – and in Bristol – for more than a century before that. And they lived here not as slaves, servants or prisoners, but as free, independent and accepted members of Tudor society.

'Portrait of a Moor' by Jan Mostaert

Dr Miranda Kaufmann’s painstaking research saw her go through thousands of parish registers of births, marriages and deaths, court cases and tax returns to find evidence of at least hundreds of individuals from Africa who made their lives in England.

She found evidence of at least 360 – some recorded only briefly in a parish register or tax return, and her book, Black Tudors, tells the story of ten of them in particular, from a royal trumpeter to a silk weaver.

And, as a port with trading links to Spain and Portugal and the opening links with west Africa, Bristol was prominent as a place for black people to be seen in Tudor times.

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Edward Colston and Bristol's slave trade

One of the ten was an African woman called Cattelena, who lived the life of a rural villager in Almondsbury – then a small village a few miles north of Bristol.

“She’s described as a single woman, and it’s important because Almondsbury at that time was a rural village, and there she was living in a home with another woman.

“Africans were living in the countryside, not necessarily in big towns or ports. She had a very ordinary life there, it seems. Her cow was her most valuable possession, and that would’ve provided her with an income,” she added.

While evidence of the African woman in Almondsbury comes from records of her estate after her death, there was more evidence of the time when 135 Africans lived in Bristol.

A trumpeter, named John Blanke, was in the court of Henry VIII

“It was in the middle of the war with the Spanish, in 1590, so a couple of years after the Armada,” added Dr Kaufmann.

“A ‘prize ship’, a ship taken in a battle by privateers, arrived in Bristol. It was either Portuguese or Spanish, and contained 135 African men, who were then put up in a barn by the city authorities while it was decided what would happen to them.

“The decision was taken to send them back to Spain, but it is vaguely possible that some may have managed to escape.

“What is fascinating is that the Mayor of Bristol and treasurer of the city wrote to the Privy Council – the Government of the day – asking for £300 to meet the costs of looking after them.

“The letter basically says that Bristol has been providing them with board and lodgings, and really the Privy Council in London should pay because the ship that brought them to Bristol was a Queen’s ship,” she said.

The presence of free Africans living normal lives in Tudor England should reassess people’s perspective on the slave trade, that took hold from Bristol by the end of the following century.

“They came to England from Africa, from Europe and from the Spanish Caribbean,” said Dr Kaufmann.

“They came with privateers, pirates, merchants, aristocrats, even kings and queens, and were accepted into Tudor society.

“They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England and paid wages like other Tudors.

“Yet their experience was extraordinary because, unlike the majority of Africans across the rest of the Atlantic world, in England they were free.

“They lived in a world before the English became heavily involved in the slave trade, and before they founded their first surviving colony in the Americas.

Black Tudors by Miranda Kaufmann

“These stories alter the traditional narrative that racial slavery was inevitable and that it was imported to colonial Virginia from Tudor England. They force us to re-examine the 17th century to find out what caused perceptions to change so radically.

“They also challenge the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and force us to re-evaluate our shared history,” she added.